Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

ISSN: 1600-910X (Print) 2159-9149 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdis20

Human capital at work: performance

measurement, prospective valuation and labour
inequality

Guy Redden

To cite this article: Guy Redden (2020): Human capital at work: performance measurement,
prospective valuation and labour inequality, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, DOI:
10.1080/1600910X.2020.1734848

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2020.1734848

Published online: 16 Apr 2020.

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DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2020.1734848

Human capital at work: performance measurement,

prospective valuation and labour inequality
Guy Redden
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The proximate roots of performance measurement lie in a 1980s Performance measurement;
shift in management accountancy away from lagging and metrics; labour; inequality;
financial indicators towards leading ones that indicate potential neoliberalism; valuation;
indicators; gig economy
for future value creation, especially regarding intangible assets
and functions. This paper proposes that such innovations in
accountancy are not merely technical but are driven by contextual
economic imperatives. It shows how PM articulates with capital
owner demand for maximal value creation under the shareholder
value model of the corporation rationalized through neoliberal
economic thought and new economy discourses. Performance
metrics cascade through organizational levels so as to highlight
the apparent contributions of actors held accountable for aspects
of value creation. They allow a subtle shift away from Taylorist
operational statistics based on demonstrated achievable values
towards prospective calculative rationality that enjoins all to
manage their own capacity to increase value amid expectations of
continuous improvement. Quantifying labour by putative
performance outputs also allows for differential levels of reward
and the marketization of wage relations favoured by agency
theory. It has been central to new ways of eliciting more output
for less reward from gig economy and neotaylorist workers, while
also enabling the emergence of the equity-owning ‘superstar
manager class’ that Piketty sees as distinctive of contemporary
inequality. Its members largely configure and benefit from
performance-related pay frameworks that reward executives for
minimizing costs relative to ‘maximizing’ of the value chains they
oversee.

According to Hacking (1982) an avalanche of printed numbers came about in the mid
nineteenth century at the point when the statistical study of populations had developed
into a ‘moral science’ inseparable from calls for social reform. The statistical zeal revolved
around the idea that by knowing populations you could improve them (1982, 281). Such
incessant extension of enumeration ‘demands kinds of things or people to count’ (279)
and in doing so creates visible and governable groups with characteristics confirmed
through measurement – groups such as the poor, criminal and sick. When reform
proved somewhat harder to achieve than some had hoped the measurement frenzy

CONTACT Guy Redden guy.redden@sydney.edu.au School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of
Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 G. REDDEN

settled, but it left ‘large bureaucracies that functioned with the categories and statistics’
(281). Its legacy would be routine comparison of statistical constructs of normal
persons and conditions with those that differ, providing a basis for governments to inter-
vene in populations with the aim of effecting conceptions of desirable social order.
Today we appear to be living through another signal moment in the history of
quantification.
Its digital cutting edge has created something akin to a data deluge. All kinds of
domains and constructs are subject to statistical mapping that is afforded by computer-
mediated data processing, storage and communication. Compilation of large data sets
(‘big data’) promises that all events can become measurable and calculable with less
reliance on sampling, leading to information as granular and detailed as it is extensive.
Everything can be captured, quantified and computed from sports plays to research
outputs, online activities and lifestyle preferences. ‘Calculation, in other words, is becom-
ing a ubiquitous element of human life’ (Thrift 2008, 92). So it is that data collection and
computation start to merge through algorithms that continually define the world through
measurable dimensions and produce information that is fed back into further rounds of
calculation. Much recent work in science and technology studies and economic sociology
stresses that rendering qualities of diverse phenomena quantifiable enrols them into into
particular kinds of calculative activity that deserve both theoretical and empirical attention
(Callon and Law 2005; Kalthoff 2011).
This article will consider one aspect of contemporary social quantification and critical
economic issues it raises – the measurement of organizational performance and how it is
tied up with changing ways of valuing labour. However, first it is necessary to recognize
how the ubiquity of calculation presents challenges for social theory. In recent years the
sociology of quantification has arisen to grapple with the conceptual challenges entailed
(Espeland and Stevens 2008). It has sought understanding of commonalities between con-
temporary quantification practices while acknowledging the variety of forms, objects and
contexts of measurement. Is the most recent statistical frenzy anything more than an effect
of numerous ways of using digital technologies to measure? Or, to what extent might the
latter share resemblances that potentially signify their imbrication with broader sociohis-
torical formations?

The metric society

The history of natural science is continuous with innovations in metrology and instru-
mentation required to measure physical signals. Particle accelerators and other advanced
technologies show how this history continues to unfold. However, the contemporary
extension of quantification is particularly distinguished by measures designed to
produce information about social situations and intangible conditions. As Mau (2019)
argues this is not in the form of an outpouring of quantitative social science inquiry
with all its methodological entailments. It appears instead as an outpouring of metrics,
measures used to track processes. For Mau (2019), their proliferation is borne of ways
of running institutions that conceive of everything as a potential data point in line with
a normalized belief that this can produce knowledge useful for those who seek to
manage and optimize almost any activity. Unsurprisingly, much critical sociological
work suggests that metrics in the form of summary indicators are unable to produce
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 3

valid knowledge about social complexity in a methodologically reliable way. They appear
more liable to simplify and distort, especially when the actors whose activities are quan-
tified are involved in and affected by the collection, representation and use of the data
(Espeland and Sauder 2016; Mau 2019; Muller 2018).
Quantification is contestable from an epistemological viewpoint concerned about the
reliability of the kind of knowledge it produces (Redden 2015), and by extension this
means we must question the role of related ‘technical mechanisms for making judgements,
prioritizing problems and allocating scarce resources’ in public life (Rose 1991, 673).
However, the largely simplistic statistical form of metrics may also be crucial to what
they do in and with social situations in general terms. Above all they score items. For
instance, credit scores rate the worthiness of persons in relation to debt products (Four-
cade and Healy 2013) and college rankings render complex factors seen to constitute
quality of education into a score for each institution aimed at prospective students (Espe-
land and Sauder 2016). In each case the simplification via quantification is inherent to a
market setting in which actors using metrics have an interest in differentiating between the
values of items. They thus need numeric values that are clear enough to allow differen-
tiations to happen regardless of complexities that may be occluded.
This is also to say their use to achieve valuation is another common characteristic of the
kinds of measurement practices that have been in the ascendant in recent years (Adkins
and Lury 2011). As Muniesa (2011) argues, valuation is a pragmatic process. Values
created are contingent upon the methods adopted amid given social relations where
agents with particular aims evaluate particular things for specific reasons. While measure-
ment relies upon and helps to form categories (such as population groups like the poor or
sick noted by Hacking), metric scales also have another basic property. They have ‘built-in
valuation’ because ‘the represented information enables an immediate evaluation in terms
of “more” and “less”’ (Diaz-Bone 2016, 54). Here we see how the apparently objective
counting of properties can take on a moral character when the phenomena counted are
considered more or less desirable qualities of the lifeworld. As Mau puts it, ‘objects
with the same score are deemed equally good’ but ‘those with different scores can be
arranged in order of “better or worse”’. And this is precisely the point in many practices
of social evaluation that centre upon metrics. Espeland and Sauder (2016) capture in
painstaking detail how very few academics believe that the moral categories of good
and bad colleges produced by law school rankings are based on much more than assump-
tions, pragmatic choices and questionable data in the process of compiling indicators that
combine into final composite indexes. Such examples may frustrate anyone who believes
the representation to be unfair and it may ‘foreclose other modes of creating and expres-
sing value’ (200), but it thereby signifies how quantification powerfully converges with
social practices of valuation, potentially trumping alternatives.
In this regard the French economics of convention school has provided influential lines
of thought for the theorization of metrics (Fourcade and Healy 2017). It stresses that
dominant institutional practices of valuation allow the construction of ‘orders of worth’,
and they include methods of quantification that ‘test’ values and provide apparent
evidence to justify particular rationalizations for the allocation of social goods
(Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). In these terms stratification of values created by
metrics may be considered means through which unequal social fields are legitimated,
constructed and managed. In a series of articles, Fourcade and Healy (2013, 2016,
4 G. REDDEN

2017) show how metrics sort and classify in ways that affect the life chances of those with
whom measured characteristics are associated. Measures such as credit scores not only
result in different kinds of access to goods such as financial products, they are predicated
on the differentiation between values as a basis for economic action. This allows ‘a new
regime of moralized social classification, backed by algorithmic techniques and dependent
on large volumes of quantitative data’ (2016, 10) that help form categories of persons in
relation to socio-economic situations. In other words, at least insofar as they are shaped
by pecuniary interests, metrics can create class-like effects of stratified access to goods
and recognition and even convey kinds of capital represented by scores. In this metrics
help generate distinctive ‘classification situations’ when different levels of cardinal
scores are segmented into classes that can be placed in ordinal ranks on scales of value
with regard to given sets of relations – and such classifications shape the social power
of actors.

Neoliberal numbers
Along these lines there are grounds to propose that contemporary metrics are often
oriented towards the acceptance and use of socio-economic inequalities rather than
seeing them as a problem of governance to be solved. For several scholars (Beer 2016;
Giannone 2016; Mau 2019; Redden 2019) they are part and parcel of a trend towards neo-
liberal governance which prefers markets as a means of allocation of goods, leading to a
spread of market logics throughout social institutions. In this setting the overriding
social interest brought to measurement is that of managing individuals, events and corpor-
ate entities insofar as they have a bearing upon the creation of value. But Desrosières
(2011) notes indicators in the neoliberal period do this in a way different from the
social and economic statistics that emerged to survey populations and economies as
grounds for central planning in the welfare and Keynesian state formations. They are
instead oriented towards ‘creating incentives for enterprise’ by representing the value of
‘target variables’ in a way often designed to encourage agents to foster their improvement
(46). Their spread is driven by neoliberal microeconomic management of the ‘perform-
ances’, i.e. value outputs, of individuals and agencies involved in production. Metrics,
across private and public sectors, above all track processes in order to score performances
in the service of a value-increase morality of ‘improvement’.
Metrics supply information for supposedly optimal market assessments, such as which
debt products to assign or which law school is worth paying for, but also often provide
cues for actors (such as debt consumers or law schools) to improve scores if they want
to create or access better market opportunities. Commensuration effected by metrics
also creates a ‘dispositif of comparison’ (Mau 2019) that not only allows market actors
to differentiate between values as a basis for transactions, but enjoins competition
between them precisely because they are invited to out-perform others in comparative
terms to access the different relative benefits that follow from numeric values (Beer
2016; Mau 2019). Metrics can thus act as quantitative mechanisms that help to intensify
and extend market logic in the ways valorized by neoliberal theorists, i.e. that markets are
worth the inequalities they generate because agents striving to maximize value for them-
selves versus others will create more overall value due to the aggregate effects of wide-
spread competitive enterprise.
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 5

The remainder of this article outlines how performance measurement is one example of
how metrics can be agents of change that foster patterns of marketization within organ-
izations – in ways that help to reconfigure how labour is valued and rewarded.

Performance measurement
Kelemen and Rumens (2008, 128) summarize how diverse organizational worlds share a
concern with quantifiable data. Since the late 1980s, statistics, in particular those promis-
ing ‘precise measurement of organizational performance’ have ‘permeated organizational
discourse like never before’. Quantification ‘is seen to lie at the heart of competent man-
agement and effective and profitable organizational life’ and in particular it forms the basis
of numerical control systems that have displaced social and interpersonal ones (Kelemen
and Rumens 2008, 128). These organizational practices of quantification have developed
along with the discourses that rationalize their use. Searches through Google’s NGRAM
viewer, which calculates the incidence of phrases over millions of books, show a recent
emergence of an interrelated set of concepts around the need to establish levels of perform-
ance within organizations and hold actors accountable for them. Muller (2018, 6) found
the terms ‘metrics’, ‘performance indicators’, ‘accountability’, and ‘benchmarks’, to have
been little used before the mid-1980s, after which time their use increased sharply. Espe-
land and Sauder (2016, 3) confirmed the rise of this language and its correlation with other
terms including ‘transparency’, ‘audit’, and ‘rankings’.
Despite a long history of operational statistics used for technical processes in industrial
and public sector bureaucracies, performance measurement as such only started to
become a widespread practice with the emergence of these distinctive languages. It
centres upon the use of quantitative techniques to evaluate outcomes of organizational
activities, and its proximate roots lie in a turn away from purely financial indicators in
accountancy (Redden 2019). In providing managers with models of how well organiz-
ations were performing financially through measures like return on capital employed,
post-war management accounting was the main predecessor of performance measure-
ment. However, in the 1980s numerous influential business writers suggested its limit-
ations were also behind the relative decline of US industry compared with Japanese
(Franco-Santos and Bourne 2005, 114). Bourne (2005, 102) summarizes the criticisms
of traditional financial measures that have a basis in costing. They were seen as encoura-
ging short-termism, lacking strategic focus, encouraging local optimization, encouraging
minimization of variance rather than continuous improvement and not being externally
focussed towards market conditions. Financial metrics were largely aimed at modelling
the efficiency of current operations, but such a parochial gaze was implicated in the sup-
posed sclerosis of Fordist industry.
Reliance on management accounting became equated with managing through the rear-
view mirror. As Neely (1999, 206) puts it ‘Sales turnover, for example, simply reports what
happened last week, last month or last year, whereas most managers want predictive
measures that indicate what will happen next week, next month, or next year’. Rather
than focusing on refinement of resource utilization, the new discourse centred upon the
need to map how to get from A to B in an unstable, globalizing new economy where inno-
vative firms were seen to have competitive advantage. It was not that financial metrics
were eschewed entirely, but that they reveal only one dimension of an enterprise and
6 G. REDDEN

stand for the financial results of other critical organizational processes that might go
unmeasured. The most famous and widely adopted of PM frameworks The Balanced Scor-
ecard (Kaplan and Norton 1992) solved this problem by positing that dimensions that lead
to good financial results should also be mapped. This meant finding measures for concerns
that cut across all organizations – such as how satisfied clients are – but also finding tai-
lored combinations of numerous detailed and high-level performance indicators that
should be relevant to a given organization’s strategy.

Prospective valuation
Such ‘strategy mapping’ (Kaplan and Norton 1992) would allow definition of things that
matter most in management’s view of what will determine future success, while measure-
ment simultaneously rates progress towards goals and presents correlations with financial
results in ways that might inform future strategy. But above all, PM effects management
control (Alvesson 2015, 6), though less through central directives or direct supervision
than a dispersed language of quantity that focuses the attention of all workers on what
matters – the values that are measured and especially those that are designated KPIs
(key performance indicators). This then allows people and units deemed responsible for
areas of activity to be held to account for performance levels conveyed by the data.
Robert Eccles’ (1991) ‘Performance Measurement Manifesto’ in the Harvard Business
Review encapsulates the thinking. He proposed leading companies use PM to make
visible intangible drivers of performance – from flexibility, timeliness, human resources,
stakeholder satisfaction and generally quality in all aspects of the value chain that aggre-
gate into the overall performance of a firm. The ‘lagging’ financial indicators that inform
one about the past are supplemented by ‘leading’ ones from which the future can be
extrapolated, and:
Once the information architecture and supporting technology are in place, the next step is to
align the new system with the company’s incentives – to reward people in proportion to their
performance on the measures that management has said truly matter. (Eccles 1991, 135)

Overall, in theory at least, PM creates a management information system with bite. Not
only should managers get all critical data about what matters, goals of managers and
workers become aligned, and workers may also be given incentives to perform well includ-
ing through compensation systems that are linked to how well they advance corporate
strategy as judged by measures (Kaplan and Norton 2001). But this also raises the question
of the performance standards by which individuals and units might be judged. How might
one establish an appropriate performance value? In fact, this question is rarely asked in the
practitioner literature and is largely settled by interpreting performance values compara-
tively (Redden 2019). That is to say comparison with previous figures or benchmarks set
by other units, competitors or consultants establishes how good performance appears to be
in relative terms. There may be no fixed performance standard, but higher value (or lower
for a negative quality such as defect rates, costs, or processing time) will always be morally
better on any scale. This fits the logic of strategic management like a glove because strat-
egies centre upon specific goals to be met within a time-frame and are ‘designed to effect
“improvement”’ (Otley 1999, 367). Indeed, ‘continuous improvement’ became a core
concept of PM-oriented management philosophies designed to spark high performance
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 7

cultures in response to the new economy. Its ‘essence’ is to seek ‘constantly ways in which
products and processes can be improved, so that greater value can be delivered (…) at ever
greater levels of efficiency’. (Neely 1999, 211).
In this way PM can be considered to deploy metrics to the end of prospective valua-
tion – that is an orientation towards morally valorizing expansion of value or greater
value in future as evidenced by comparison with other performance values from the
past or elsewhere. This strong normative emphasis does not dwell on the problem of
what right values are, because whatever metric values or the context, comparatively
better performances are the right ones. This is expressed in associated target-setting phil-
osophies. Kaplan and Norton (1996) suggest workers be rewarded relative to performance
values and that targets should ideally be ‘stretch’ targets, i.e. ones that spur organizational
actors to reach higher performance levels by setting goals beyond what has previously been
seen as possible. Targets then become less about cold analysis of what is contextually
achievable and more about speculative valuation designed to motivate actors to break
through to ever-greater performance levels. Empirical studies affirm that, aside from the
exact degree of ‘stretch’ expected, the most common way of setting performance target
values is as a quantum of desired improvement over previous values (Johnston, Brignall,
and Fitzgerald 2001).

Getting human capital to work

However, such emergence of performance measurement and targeting should not be con-
sidered purely technical innovations in accountancy. Accounting innovations are driven
by pecuniary interests in the economics of organizations (Hopwood 1987) and the con-
ventions they put to work enact common demands of an economic environment (Chia-
pello 2017, 56). Chiapello (2017) proposes that accounting has been central to value
trials that allow neoliberal capitalism to operate and that especially in the US accounting
research has become deeply influenced by Chicago School economics (2017, 50). The par-
ticular ways of taking stock of organizational value that PM enacts emerged in concert
with ways of rethinking firms under the influence of financialization and neoliberal econ-
omics (Redden 2019).
In line with Chicago-School models this saw business enterprises recast such that stock
prices were seen as the fundamental measure of the value of the firm (Fourcade and
Khurana 2013). The focus on capital market interests constructed the only terminal
value of the corporation as the delivery of value to shareholders (Davies 2014, 104).
Indeed, the ideology of shareholder primacy viewed the corporation as a vehicle for the
maximization of shareholder value. This involved a critique of other potential sectional
interests within the firm – of say workers or empire building managers, who may be
acting rationally in their own interests (as homo oeconimus is expected to in economic
theory), but not necessarily in ways aligned with the interests of owners. Agency theory
was seen as the solution to industrial bureaucracies that had allowed workers and man-
agers within the corporation to be sheltered from market forces and thus the need to maxi-
mize values on behalf of their principals: owners to whom they are contracted. It proposed
that the firm become seen internally as a nexus of contracts for the delivery of perform-
ances by agents to their principals, thus coordinating production through economic incen-
tives and direct remuneration for value created towards the overall end of shareholder
8 G. REDDEN

value maximization (Heckscher 2015). Performance measurement was the principal

method of oversight proposed by agency theorists to ensure delivery of value at all
steps and to reward agents proportionately in order to direct their motivation.
From the mid-1980s accountancy methods would enable tracking of value creation as
conceptualized in the value-based management paradigm of shareholder capitalism. This
allowed its reification in enumeration practices of objectives and performance measures
that represent the value-adds of agents, creating a ‘common language for employees
across all corporate functions’ (Bourguignon 2005). In this the commensuration
allowed by metrics is of a certain kind. It is precisely not encumbered by languages
about particular values. Instead the generalization of performance metrics reveals the
extent of value created against normative expectations around the maximal creation of
value. Maximizing should take over from merely satisficing as Ezzamel, Willmott, and
Worthington (2008, 114) put it. Value-based management thus has a numerical lingua
franca that renders all kinds of activity commensurable for judgement against the criterion
of value increase – whatever the localized activity and measurement scale may be.
When viewed through the analytic rubric of labour this translates into a basic orien-
tation towards the expectation of more output where maximization of possible perform-
ance value is the standard of the best for a worker or unit to be judged by. It is here,
through the moral possibilities that inhere in numeric values, that performance measure-
ment provides a technical basis to transform the moral basis of work and its reward. It
effects a justificatory regime for distribution and allocation decisions that enable the
value orientations of an economic discourse to be enacted within an economic context,
and it does this by creating certain kinds of tests of value that ritually confirm the assump-
tions of that discourse through metrics.
The exhaustive analysis of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) shows how the 1980s and
1990s saw the rise of a new ‘network’ cité (or justificatory regime) in business discourse,
one that that weakened previous collectivist rationales for the social organization of capit-
alism. It associated emancipatory discourses around labour – such as workers’ desire for
fulfilment and autonomy from alienated work – with entrepreneurial activity. It valorized
‘flexible’ and ‘innovative’ corporations and individuals who take risk, value freedom and
embrace competition. Such subjects do not rely on established bureaucratic structures or
hierarchies, and as workers they accept responsibility for developing projects and net-
works while seeing them as chances to learn and expand their competencies. The
worker in this discourse is an (unalienated) ‘whole person’ prepared to put the whole of
their life and personal energies to work rather than insist on a clear demarcation
between them. They do not demand security of employment on either psychic or material
levels. Instead the ‘key concept in this view of working life is employability’, which is ‘a
personal capital that each individual has to manage in his/her own way. It is the sum
total of a person’s usable competencies’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 184). Employabil-
ity based on the value of a person’s capital makes for ways of rationalizing workers’ for-
tunes that see them as a result of their capacities and performances.
Through the human capital concept, Becker (1993) and neoliberal economists had pro-
vided an underlying economic theory of labour to support the reimagining of the worker
as someone who, supposedly like any economic subject, actively seeks to apply means to
ends optimally. Income becomes seen as a return on their deployment of their own genetic
or acquired competencies, personal assets, which like other forms of capital can increase in
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 9

value as a result of purposive economic action, such as ‘investment’ in oneself through

education. As a matter of principle owners of human capital can be expected to
respond ‘systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment’ with econ-
omic calculus (Foucault 2008, 269) and are thus susceptible to government through
ways of configuring environments. Accordingly the concept makes it ‘possible to
govern subjects seeking to increase the value of their human capital, or, more precisely,
to act on the way they govern themselves’, by inciting them to ‘adopt conducts deemed
valorizing and to follow models for self-valuation that modify their priorities and inflect
their strategic choices’ (Feher 2009, 27).
For Cooper (2015), in the corporation this has happened through management control
systems that use metrics to give economic force to the human capital concept. It is not only
a matter of business discourses that ‘depict’ the worker as a driver of value for the firm, but
‘performance metrics, ratios, balanced-scorecards and other technologies, play a role in
producing an account of the value of our human capital, its ranking, position’. This is
not merely for taking stock but to cause agents to self-monitor in the interests of the prin-
cipal (owners) in the course of seeking to maximize return for themselves in ways that
encourage mutual economic calculations around capital and its deployment. This solves
the problem of how to get maximum value from the worker. It positions them as
someone who needs to maximize their own performance metrics ‘so that they can maxi-
mize their current and/or future income’ by satisfying the calculative interests of the prin-
cipal (Cooper 2015, 16). This is, of course, precisely the aim of agency theory. It engenders
market-like employment relations where workers above all are enjoined to supply an out-
standing performance to those who demand one.

Differently pricing labour

In these terms, performance measurement can be seen as a control method that activates
workers into taking responsibility for advancing capital accumulation. Brown (2015)
argues that neoliberal economization of social life ‘is distinctive in its discursive pro-
duction of everyone as human capital’. This means, whether acting within a firm or else-
where, the person is treated as though a firm themselves, i.e. action is construed as making
investments designed to increase one’s returns from transactions with other actors in
market-like environments that lack guaranteed outcomes. PM is a mechanism by which
such logic can be specifically implemented within firms and all organizations. At the
same time, many who are treated as though ‘human capital’ continue to work for wages
and salaries – so what material difference might this make to the commodification of
labour?
The first point here is that the human capital model displaces the previous liberal
notion that the labour contract is an agreement among free, formally equal sovereigns
to exchange property (labour power and capital) at a proper value in the marketplace.
As Feher (2009) points out this involves a humanist distinction between what we are
and what we own that correlates with the classical liberal separation between market
and non-market spheres, which in turn allows social reproduction to be seen to require
social orders different from those that pertain to markets. But this breaks down in the
human capital model when one has a proprietary relation to one’s whole self, and one’s
fortunes become seen as shaped by all kinds of self-investments one can bring to bear
10 G. REDDEN

as a thoroughly self-responsible economic subject – rather than contingent upon rights or

needs that might constrain market action (Feher 2009). Seeking returns as a de facto pro-
prietor of self is not an exchange for time or labour power within clear limits. There are no
a priori distinctions between kinds of resources the worker brings to the bargain if the
mandate for firms, organizational units and individuals is to ‘entrepreneurialize,
enhance competitive positioning and value, maximize ratings or rankings’ (Brown in
Cooper 2015, 16). Rather, the demand for a subject to maximize by whatever means are
at their disposal facilitates the ‘subsumption of the whole person into work’ (Boltanski
and Chiapello 2005, 184).
So if as Jerry Harbour puts it in The Basics of Performance Measurement, the main goal
of PM ‘to do more better and faster with less’ (2009, 1) it may do so because it enjoins
workers leverage whatever capacities and resources they have maximally rather than
within reasonable limits informed by social democratic principles regarding welfare and
rights. In times when management philosophies expect workers to be ‘agile’, i.e. to align
their personal activities intimately with changeable corporate requirements – tracking
labour performance through quantification provides a mechanism by which the agile
subject always has something to respond to in entrepreneurial fashion, but it is also a
mechanism that simulataneously exposes them to increased precarity when associated
compensation is also unstable and diminished overall (Moore 2017). Indeed, through per-
formance metrics fairness itself can be recast away from a calculus of reasonable inputs of
time and energy for reasonable pay towards the idea people can be justly rewarded in pro-
portion to whatever level of outputs they are personally taken as responsible for creating.
PM would appear a perfect technology to enrol workers into economic calculus that
binds them to production relations in which capital has little loyalty to the worker,
however. The emergence of PM during a period of increasing work intensification and
extensification and a decline in real hourly pay for many seems more than happenstance.
The enterprising, flexible worker does not necessarily command a high price for their work
and is more easily dispensible on the moral basis of performance level, which can also
justify variable pricing of labour. At the same time as liberalization of employment laws
have allowed more hiring and firing, continual rating of performance makes people and
units worth the latest, transitory values that yoke fates to numerical fluctuations. When
performance metrics inform human resource practices they act like prices that mediate
the allocation of resources and the distribution of rewards and sanctions. In this, perform-
ance may be construed as a competitive game where continually outperforming compara-
tors in ordinal terms is the overarching requirement of the corporation.
For example, in much neotaylorist work pre-formatted work routines, electronic track-
ing and pressure to maximize performance converge in the ‘ruthless economy’ (Head
2005). It is normal for call and contact centres to operate around targets and bonuses
that see workers rated on potentially conflicting indicators of processing time (the
shorter the better), conformity (staying on script) and quality of engagement with custo-
mers (Winiecki 2008; Taylor et al. 2002; Sewell, Barker, and Nyberg 2012). Workers are
thus judged relative to each other on how they personally manage to achieve maximal out-
comes from their personal capacities for speed, interaction and obedience. Taylor and
Bain’s ethnography (1999) shows how despite cost pressures passed on to workers,
contact centres were seen as critical sites to add value to customer satisfaction. Operators
were set stretch targets such as converting a minimum (but arbitrary) number of enquiries
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 11

into sales, as well as navigating the obvious trade-offs between quality and quantity metrics
and the tendency for targets to inflate over time. Studies routinely reveal the gaming of
metrics that occurs when workers find ways to manipulate measurement frameworks
through the easiest tactical means possible, and also the complex forms of resistance,
resentment and accommodation that come with knowing that unfair frameworks
mediate the work of helping others that can actually be fulfilling under the right circum-
stances (Barnes 2004).
Amazon currently appears to be attempting to perfect the neotaylorist genre of per-
formance measurement. Mobile scanning technologies are so intimate they log all move-
ments of warehouse workers who are set crushing targets for picking stock that require
them to work at athletic levels for fear of losing jobs only available under casual contracts.
In this ‘hellscape’ (in the words of one worker), every single pick in a 24,000 square metre
warehouse is set to a timer with a worker’s performance downrated by the second for each
missed deadline, with workers required to give a justificatory account for performances
twice a day (Hatch 2018). Indeed, maximization explicitly trumps fairness as a value in
such work scenarios. Tesco warehouse workers wear armbands that assign them scores
of 100 for a pick in the expected time, but 200 hundred if they are completed in half
the time (Moore 2017, 164). Meanwhile Amazon drivers working to delivery targets
defined by logistics apps must manage their own allocation of time and energy to that
end, and have been known to make the associated ‘rational economic decisions’ to
break road laws and defecate into bags (Solon 2018).
In these cases, performance measurement effects work intensification through manage-
rial control of targets and their consequences for those who fall below or above the line.
Another example of the imperative to outperform comparators is the performance
review procedure, forced ranking (Grote 2005). Performance metrics have become routi-
nely used in promotion and demotion procedures in many fields (Campbell 2008), but
forced ranking takes the logic of differential valuation to the extreme. It goes beyond
reward or punishment relative to target values. Instead it guarantees that performance
ratings of workers are judged against each other directly, with use of a bell curve to
force a pre-determined proportion of workers into the lowest and highest ranks. Typically
the top decile or two are awarded generous bonuses and the bottom ones are put on notice
or fired. First popularized by GE’s ‘rank and yank’ system (that CEO Jack Welch tellingly
referred to as ‘differentiation’), forced ranking was widely adopted in the corporate world
to provide workforces with a kind of meta-incentive for all to create value and be rewarded
proportionately (Hopper and Hopper 2007, 236). It found its perverse apotheosis in the
Enron’s demanding Performance Review Committee which placed no predetermined
cap on the bonuses of the highest performing traders while leading many to be fired
(Thomas 2002; Wang 2007). It was little wonder that with such high-stakes performance
values were fraudulently inflated across the company, until it all fell apart.
Today the on-demand gig work enabled by the digital platform economy is designed
around the use of performance metrics to effect algorithmic management of labour
supply and pricing. Sham contracted workers for services like Uber or Deliveroo are
defined as legally self-responsible sole traders as though they are entrepreneurs when
working for the companies. Workers are attracted by the promise of capitalizing on
their own assets, initiative and flexibility to choose what work they take on (Rosenblat
and Stark 2016). In reality the apps track their behaviours and consumer ratings in
12 G. REDDEN

order to evaluate them though rolling performance metrics that shape future work, status
and rewards available to each worker.
Rosenblat and Stark (2016) show how Uber profiles drivers via metrics such as the
proportion of time they are available, numbers and kinds of jobs they accept, complete
and cancel, and the all-important driver rating given by customers. Weekly performance
reviews rank them relative to other drivers and their previous performances by category.
Drivers are often summarily dismissed (‘deactivated’) on the basis of undisclosed data,
and with a logic similar to forced ranking, high minimum customer ratings of 4.6
from 5 are required in order both to remain eligible to receive work via the app and
to access minimal pay guarantees. Meanwhile studies find that these consequential cus-
tomer ratings of drivers can be arbitrary and subject to racial and gender bias (Frenken
and Schor 2017). The chosen metrics are stacked to the principal’s terms which are to
have high numbers of compliant workers on stand-by as much as possible while they
compelled to tolerate bad customers and unprofitable jobs for fear of being downrated.
Meanwhile costs are shifted to the worker while the company minimizes corporate
responsibility for issues such as risk and safety, and Uber controls pricing and pay
rates, often reducing them. According to Schor and Attwood-Charles (2017, 9) a
decade of research suggests the kind of on-demand labour markets created by gig plat-
forms effect work intensification under poor conditions where workers sell labour for a
lower price and rely on high work volumes for income. Performance metrics play a
crucial role in constructing these relations by requiring workers compete to achieve
high performance levels in exchange for access to diminished remuneration and employ-
ment conditions.
This is not an argument that PM is used identically in all organizations, but these
examples show how metrics are configured to find performances to be of different relative
values across instances and thus justifying unequal allocations of goods and orders of
worth and motivating actors who might be subject to the consequences of unequal
scoring to perform as required – which is on the terms of the principal. A critical factor
is that there is no guaranteed fair formula for translating metric values into financial
ones. Adkins (2015) proposes that the wage repression evident over recent decades is
an effect of the breakdown of the wage-labour relation in post-Fordism (338) that involves
‘decoupling of wages from the value created via labour’ (342). While this involves ‘multiple
economic, legal, and political actors’ (342), performance measurement itself is a decou-
pling technology insofar as its fetish for representing outcomes detracts from rational
scrutiny of relationships between inputs and outputs as per traditional productivity
measures. When performance standards are expressed in relative and prospective terms
there is less discursive space to articulate a calculus of fair reward proportionate to the
actual inputs of workers, which is trumped by the fetish for normalizing expectations of
higher outputs. In short, it seems fair to suppose that the decline of the labour share is
linked to lower pay relative to time and energy expended, and that this decline is at
least obsfuscated by, if not engendered and legitimated by, measurement systems that
make workers strive to attain demanding standards required even for moderate remunera-
tion or the right to keep an insecure job. Or in business parlance, it effects ‘sweating your
assets’.
However, there is one group who seems to have done well from differential evaluation
of performance and labour: executives, whose remuneration is now heavily weighted
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 13

towards performance-related pay. They are the organizational cadre that is directly
answerable to capital owner demands for final shareholder value. In line with agency
theory one might thus expect their pay to track the stock values of firms they manage,
but the reality is a little more complex. A basket of performance measures related to
targets and thresholds typically trigger variable rates of executive pay and bonuses, but
the prices assigned to particular target values, improvements or achievements are nor-
mally determined by benchmarking of pay levels with those of other executives
(Murphy 1999). What is more, stock options are one of the principal components of remu-
neration, ensuring executives themselves share the owner’s imperative to extract
maximum performance from all assets, including workers, at minimal cost to owners.
But executive pay has undertaken its own decoupling from value created (Erturk et al.
2005). It is no wonder it continues to inflate at much higher rates than stock prices or
general pay, when as Otley (2003, 323) notes, executive remuneration committees bench-
mark it to comparators in the upper quartile. Even below average performance can be
lucrative for some.

Conclusion
In conclusion, organizational performance measures share with other contemporary
metrics a tendency to mark out social orders of unequal values through data. They do
so in the course of enabling certain kinds of valuation practices in market settings
wherein those deploying metrics to evaluate situations and actors have economic interests
in the quantified social order of different values that metrics construct. This may, for
instance, lie in the marketing of debt products or producing consumer information for
college applicants, resulting in class-like ‘classification situations’ that derive from
measurement and affect the social allocation of goods (Fourcade and Healy 2013). As
this article has shown, it may also lie in new quantitative methods for differentiating
the values of workers’ activities to an enterprise and using them as a basis to justify differ-
ential distributions of material rewards, rights and responsibilities.
PM allows this by testing workers contributions to value accumulation through
defining measurable constructs of all kinds of intangible and qualitative dimensions of
performances they are seen as responsible for delivering in a contractual view of account-
ability. This can be seen as an attempt ‘to reorder the collective and individual selves that
make up organizational life’ by designing regulatory control into organizational account-
ing systems (Power 1997, 41–42). Control via indicators coordinates institutional action in
the interests of capital owners through a morality of maximization that normalizes expec-
tations of agents delivering higher performance values, and leaves system designers with
powerful means to calculate variable rewards and sanctions, providing in turn a basis for
reforming employment relations. In these terms, performance metrics are a new kind of
moral statistics used to reform social relations by making them more market-like in
line with neoliberal priorities. The mechanism allows agency theory and human capital
theory to be enacted through positioning workers increasingly as their own enterprises
responsible for leveraging personal resources towards meeting the desired end of perform-
ance maximization, and as responsible for their own fortunes when their performances are
judged in line with the criteria determined by those with power of oversight through
quantification.
14 G. REDDEN

This does not mean, however, that once implemented, regimes of performance
accountability based upon metrics necessarily lead to compliance, better performance
or enhanced control in practice. As Bourguignon and Chiapello note, performance
assessment is one of the key trials of contemporary business life (2005, 671). Their
study shows the disquiet workers often experience about schemes that use metrics to
determine variable pay. The KPIs assigned to individuals and units may not isolate
‘performances’ for which they are deemed responsible from complex causal internal
organizational and external market factors, or corporate resourcing levels beyond
their control. ‘Subjective’ measures based on managerial rating can be biased while
‘objective’ ones may be based on crude, decontextualized counts of outputs. Data col-
lection and representation are imperfect and corruptible, and all metrics may be
approximations statistically unsatisfactory for purposes of marginally differentiating
rewards.
As Desrosières (2001) reminds us accounting is a pragmatic quantification practice
with methodological criteria for ‘realism’ that would not pass muster in the sciences but
do for particular economic aims. The restless concern with value maximization that
drives PM is inimical to guarantees that organizations divert resources to ensuring
measures are fair and accurate representations of performance. Calls for better method-
ology for statistical validity in use of performance metrics would seem limited in purchase
if they fail to recognize the kind of valuation regime in which measures are deemed valid –
which ultimately is best characterized as one of value extraction, rather than value cre-
ation. PM is a historically-specific means for putting human capital under the pump,
for exploiting economic calculus and assigning differential prices to labour. Indeed,
Piketty (2014) asks scholars outside economics to help explain the genesis of new patterns
of inequality. Along these lines, PM is not only a favoured managerial tool of the distinc-
tive superstar-manager class of super-remunerated executives Piketty identifies as pulling
away from majorities whose incomes stagnated or declined in recent decades. It is a his-
torically-specific means for extracting greater value from workers and the corporation
overall via which the bonus-driven equity-owning super-star manager class has itself
formed through institutional practices of quantitative differentiation in the era of perform-
ance-related pay.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Guy Redden is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the Uni-
versity of Sydney, where he works in the field of cultural economy. His recent book Questioning
Performance Measurement: Metrics, Organizations and Power was published by Sage in 2019.

ORCID
Guy Redden http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3088-0881
 DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY 15

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